Yesterday on Fox & Friends, Gretchen Carlson interviewed a fellow
named Ed Kowalski, who is a board member of the group 9/11 Families for
a Secure America, about Arizona's new police-state immigration law. It
produced this exchange:

Carlson: According to you, politicians seem to be more
concerned about the illegals' rights than the rights of the Americans,
some of whom end up dead.

Kowalski: That's correct, that's correct. As best as we can estimate,
2,200 Americans a year are murdered by criminal illegal aliens. That
number is staggering.

Several times the chryon read: "FSM: 2,158 Killed By Illegals Every Year."

The immigrant murder rate cited by Fox News is based on a
2005 Human Events article by Mac Johnson. In the article, Johnson said
he attempted to locate statistics on "illegal alien murders" but was
told "that no one kept track" of those numbers. Johnson then "arrived at
my own approximation of the number," which he called "crude." After
admitting that "the murder rate among illegal aliens in America is
unknown," Johnson assumed that the rate at which "illegal aliens" murder
would remain consistent with murder rates from the immigrant's home
country.

Here's how Johnson's piece read:

I assumed that 3,871,912 Mexicans in America kill at the
same rate as 3,871,912 Mexicans in Mexico, then did the same for 336,717
Salvadorans, 77,000 Brazilians, 226,886 Chinese and 39 other categories
of illegal alien -- as totaled in a Census Bureau estimate of the
illegal alien population in 2000. The report's total figure was that 8.7
million illegal aliens are in our country.

[...]

So the upshot, for the journalism majors that just rejoined the
article, is that a simplistic good-faith estimate is that illegal aliens
kill between 1,806 and 2,510 people in the United States each year.

It's not surprising that Family Security Matters is indulging in this
kind of unethical chicanery; as MM notes, it has a history of bashing
immigrants with dubious statistics and old-fashioned scapegoating. As
for its standards and credibility, well, FSM has also endorsed the Birther conspiracy theory.

And now Fox News is running their garbage as fact. Nothing new there, either, really -- except that this particular smear paints 12 million people as potential murderers and criminal thugs.

In fact, empirical research over the past century
has demonstrated repeatedly that immigrants to the United States,
including the unauthorized, are far less likely to commit serious crimes
or be behind bars than the native-born. And no amount of grandstanding
by Fox and Friends will change that simple fact.

The notion that unauthorized immigrants bring the murder rates of
their home countries with them when they enter the United States is not
only inherently absurd, but has no basis in reality. For instance, a detailed study of incarceration rates in the United States using data from the 2000 Census found that foreign-born Mexicans, more than half
of whom are unauthorized, “had an incarceration rate of only 0.7
percent in 2000—more than 8 times lower than the 5.9 percent rate of
native-born males of Mexican descent.” If unauthorized Mexicans were
actually committing murders in the United States at the same pace as the
Mexican murder rate, one would expect many more foreign-born Mexicans
to be behind bars. But that is not the case.

Findings such as these should come as no surprise. Immigrants in
general are a highly motivated, “self-selected” group. That is, they
made the difficult decision to uproot themselves from their home
countries in order to create better lives for themselves in the United
States. This is not an undertaking for the lazy or feint of heart.
Moreover, given the harsh realities of U.S. immigration law, immigrants
have a great deal of incentive to not get in trouble with the law. Even legal immigrants
can be deported for relatively minor infractions, let alone
unauthorized immigrants who are nearly assured of deportation if they
fall into the hands of immigration authorities. But the bottom line is
the evidence—and the evidence shows that the vast majority of immigrants
do not commit serious crimes, regardless of their legal status.

Knowing Fox News, they will neither correct this nor apologize for
it. But every Latino immigrant on the planet should know that Fox News
is now openly smearing them.

Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.